Running 12 miles & Writing as a sport
Why are we running 300 miles when there are cars?
30 days ago, I started running. I was fed up with not losing weight, even though I regularly worked out. I also found myself amidst calls for a challenge. And the challenge was that the toughest man, claimed to be toughest man alive - David Goggins does his cardio by running at least 12 miles every day (video). So that’s how the mileage was set.
Day one, I went on a run for 12 miles. It took me more than three hours to finish that run, but I finished it. My legs were pretty sore. I walked a lot in those three hours between the running. The max I could run that day was less than half a mile. My wife was worried. At the end of the three-hour mark, I found her driving to the park where I was supposed to be running.
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Fast forward through the pain in the knees, calves, and parts of my leg that I did not know existed, I persevered through the running for 30 days, 12 miles. As I kept doing this, I could clearly see a mindset shift. The day would feel easier, and I was able to attack harder problems, more relaxed. And naturally, I fell into the rabbit hole of giving myself other goals and signing up for races now that I was running.
I had first signed up for a half marathon in October, with a goal of signing up for a full marathon before the end of the year and finishing it. That was my initial goal. But for my competitive brain and personality, I was bored of that goal in two weeks already. I was running 12 miles every day, and I felt running half marathon in October is just pointless if I’m running half marathon every day.
So I discovered this new world of ultramarathons. Ultramarathons are basically races that are longer than a marathon. A marathon is ~26 miles long, and ultramarathons could be anything from 36 miles to 100 miles to up to 300 miles. At least as of today, that is the longest I know of. But then there are some last-man-standing ultramarathons in which miles are just not capped. Until everybody else falls and one person remains, those ultras continue.
I signed up for Bigfoot 20 Mile Mountain Race in Mid August, approx. 30 odd days from my intense running routine. It’s on Friday, August 14th. I have been training for it. I have been running 12 miles every day. I went on hikes as long as 16 miles, something that I never thought I would do. The impetus for all this was really that I caught myself repeating this pattern of, oh, I’m not a runner, even through my CrossFit days, and I decided to change it.
So I signed up for Bigfoot 20, and we are training, and we’re scared, we’re happy. There are a lot of feelings about it. But one thing that you cannot take away from whatever these guys do with ultramarathons is that this is absolutely crazy, that too in today’s world, day and age, somebody’s choosing to run these many miles when clearly there’s no need for it.
When I say there’s no need for it, what I mean is when we invented bicycles & cars, that was probably the respite that people were looking for from walking long distances, where they couldn’t go, of horses, or other modes, you get the idea. Then there were flights and all. People really could go long distances and walking wasn’t a limiter.
I also found myself asking, why are these people doing this? And as much as saying, why are these people, I possess the same type of personality that wants to do it. Look at me: in my first month of running, I’m signed up for a 20-mile mountain race, which has over 4,000 feet of elevation, and even if you are dying, there’s not really much help that can reach you quickly. And I find myself very gravitated to run the Moab 240. It is a very prided race in the ultramarathon community. I found myself asking, why are these people doing it? Why am I attracted to this when clearly there is no need for it?
I’ve always been a believer of doing hard things voluntarily so that when life throws hard things at you, you are not surprised, you do not panic, you can actually handle tough things. But at the same time, I found this level of suffering: people running five days straight, without sleep, hallucinating, breaking their feets & legs, all for the glory or some form of redemption they feel they can only get through doing this.
But the theory of redemption did not stand because many of these people keep returning. So it’s not that somebody’s coming to discover themselves, and they discover and they don’t do it again. It’s clearly a case where people come, do it again and again.
And as of today, I don’t have any other explanation that some personalities have so much energy, so much to give that either they give in some other way like they start a company, they obsess about the job, and some of them start running races to find their limit. Some people end up even making a career out of them, good for them.
But one of the things that still stands out to me is these people are still doing it when there’s no need for running 300 miles to prove it to themselves, to prove it to their mind, and maybe even to prove it to other humans like us that, hey, this is possible. Before I knew about Moab 240, I did not know humans were capable of running 240 miles, five days straight, with barely any sleep.
And I have started seeing parallels in the age of AI now. The more smart people I meet, the more AI-connected they are, the more agents they are running, the more vegetable I think their brain is turning into.
And I say this because since that capability is available, there’s no need for you to read long documents or write long documents. I could have generated an essay like this, or actually ten, in less than the time I spent writing this.
So where does that leave us? I predict that in five to ten years, writing would actually become a sport. There would be ultra-writing marathons where people will come and voluntarily put themselves through the suffering of writing continuously, only using their mind, for four hours straight, six hours straight, one day straight. And we will all find it glorious, and it would all be amazing spectacle.
The point being, just how walking and running became optional, I think writing is becoming optional, and even reading too. And with that, we will only read or write the minimum amount we need, just as in modern life, how much you walk: to the car, to the store, inside the store, only when you need to.
And then long writing will emerge as a premium skill that only some people will do. People will have writing clubs in which they will write together with friends. This is where my thinking is right now in terms of where writing is going, because I don’t find many people reading or writing anymore. And we can offload it to the newer cars that are the Claude/ChatGPT.
There is more I have to write on this but I’ll have to continue this thought another time.
Starting today, I also made a promise that I will write every week. I don’t want to commit to every day because I don’t want to start throwing out slop. I still want to write when I have something worth writing about, an original thought, an original theory. Something I found myself from first principles.
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###### Footnote
It’s been a while since I wrote my last one. Life has been good, bad, and everything in between. I guess that is the most beautiful thing about life. It’s hard to label it.
Sometimes when people are negative about life, I tell them that every single amazing thing that you know is also in life. So why focus on the negative ones?
I went through family additions, new job, personal loss like I never imagined in the last two and a half years. And it has taught me something - it goes on.
I love you all. Keep going.
Aakash
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Proof of human writing:
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Originally published on substack.